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Monthly Archives: February 2002

I recently set up WebDAV on one of our Apache servers (using mod_dav) for some clients who use Adobe GoLive to maintain their website. So far, it is making life much easier for the maintainers than using ftp and trying to keep track of who was working on which files. One interesting side effect is that I’m trying to find a useful WebDAV client implementation for Linux. There are quite a few command line WebDAV clients but not much in the way of a GUI client yet. As I looked around for something I kept seeing hints that Nautilus could be used as a WebDAV client so I decided to give it a try. I’ve generally don’t use Nautilus much (I still find the old text-mode Midnight Commander faster and way more intuitive for most stuff – too bad it doesn’t support WebDAV!). Still, Nautilus has improved a great deal since the initial versions. For many tasks, it’s almost usable now.

Anway, the experience of trying to figure out the Nautilus implementation of WebDAV prompted me to post my findings and a few questions to the Nautilus mailing list in the hopes that some user feedback might help whoever is working on usability issues (and I was also hoping for some answer to the remaining questions I have). The post generated no replies or comments so I thought I’d mention it here in the hopes that someone else has some thoughts. And, if anyone knows of some other GPL, GUI WebDAV clients for Linux, I’d be interested.

In other news, I added Gary’s memory leak patch to the mod_virgule code running robots.net. Since one of the leaks was in the RSS code, which is one of our heavily used functions, this fix is a Good Thing.

I better post this while I’m thinking about it. The last couple of weeks have been way too busy. After a slow December, business really picked up in January and based on the number of new proposals we’ve been cranking out, it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down yet. Anyway, what’s happened in the last couple of weeks that’s worth telling you about? Hmmm…

I sent a mod_virgule patch to Raph a week or so ago that fixes the duplicate article problem which has been plaguing Advogato. Don’t know if he applied it or not but I’ve been using it on robots.net for a while and haven’t had any dupicate posts.

It actually snowed here in Dallas about a week ago. Real snow like we haven’t had in years. Unfortunately, it was typical Texas weather – 60F one day, heavy snow and 30F the next, and back in the 60s again after that. So most of the snow was gone within 48 hours. But I managed to shoot a few nice photos of it before it melted.

In the never-ending fight to block spam, I’ve finally found a suitable replacement for ORBS. After the demise of ORBS, a whole pile of ORBS clones sprang up and I’ve tried a lot of them. Most had tiny databases, bad data, got too many false positives, or were otherwise unsatisfactory. ORDB, however, has turned out to be the best of the bunch; as good or better than the original. Now, if I could just figure out how to pronounce the name! In addition to ORDB, we’re using SPEWS, the Spamhaus Block List, and our own private block list. We usually block 500-600 spams per day with the current setup (about 90%).